Walking has so many health benefits, and using a FitBit™ or other activity monitoring device is a great motivator. It’s the game of hitting those 10,000 steps that makes a person want to keep moving. And moving is very important.

According to Mayo Clinic, getting 30 minutes of physical activity each day is optimal and walking provides an easy, inexpensive way to see the following benefits:

• Maintain a healthy weight and lose body fat

• Prevent or manage various conditions, including heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer and type 2 diabetes

• Improve cardiovascular fitness

• Strengthen your bones and muscles

• Improve muscle endurance

• Increase energy levels

• Improve your mood, cognition, memory and sleep

• Improve your balance and coordination

• Strengthen immune system

• Reduce stress and tension

How do those 30 minutes translate to steps on an activity monitoring device? I found the answer on a verywellfit.com website post. Fair warning - there’s math involved. For those who get excited about numbers and calculations, it’s worth it to read the article. Based on your height and stride length, you can figure out the amount of steps you take in one mile. For me, and yes, I did the math, that’s 2,519 steps. At a pace of 4 miles per hour, I’m walking 2 miles in 30 minutes. That equates to about 5,000 steps. So if 30 minutes is the recommended minimum amount of activity, where did 10,000 steps come from?

Rumor has it that the guideline was derived from a marketing ploy in 1965 when a Japanese company developed a pedometer called, Manpo-kei, which means 10,000 steps meter in English.

In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine of more than 16,500 women with an average age of 72 years, those who averaged 4,400 steps per day had lower mortality rates than that of women who averaged 2,700 steps per day and that mortality rates progressively decreased before leveling out at about 7,500 steps.

An activity tracker is a good way to determine if you are achieving those 7,500 steps. However, there are some who caution the use of wearing an activity monitor, especially for those people with obsessive disorders.They believe that fitness trackers may encourage a user to ignore their bodies’ cues, like a pain in their calf or hip, and keep exercising when they shouldn’t just so they can get their steps in. There is a disassociation between how they feel and what they are being told. For some, a fitness tracker can actually be a demotivator or lead to a negative self-assessment.

Here are three ways that you can tell if you need to take a break from your activity tracker.

1. You walk around your house in circles right before bed in order to get those last 1000 steps and feel badly about yourself for only having reached 9,000. Remember the calculations done earlier? Walking 9,000 steps is equivalent to about 3.8 miles. How can one feel badly about walking 3.8 miles? All activity is good activity, and if you feel bad about walking 3.8 miles and only happy if you walk 4 miles, that is a signal that you are relying too heavily on what the device is telling you.

2. You push yourself to keep walking to meet your goal even when your body is telling you to stop. If you keep walking even though there is pain anywhere in your body just to meet the goal you set for yourself, you’re disconnected from your body. Again, you are relying too heavily on your device to tell you how you feel.

3. You’ve somehow forgotten to wear your device for the first half of the day, and even though you’ve been active, you feel that those steps didn’t count. After putting on your activity tracker halfway through the day, you still feel the need to reach 10,000 - because if you don’t see the 10,000 steps on your FitBit™, the steps from earlier in the day didn’t really happen.

Bottomline: assuming there is a healthy relationship with an activity tracker, it can promote a positive change in activity level. Moving every day will lower your risk of disease, lead to an increase in overall wellbeing, and reduce stress.